While there are still doubts over the potential sustainability of in vitro and test-tube grown meat—as well as the health of eating any meat, lab-grown or not—the ethics of these methods versus current production methods are clear.
In vitro meat is better for all animals, period.
The idea that any animal-rights activists believe that it’s “better for animals not to exist at all if there is a chance that they would suffer,” is ludicrous. Perhaps the authors forget the myriad of wild animals we share the world with; those whose widespread habitat destruction comes not just from housing developments, but from clear-cutting forest for pasture or soy cropland (most soy is grown to feed farmed animals).
The authors are correct in that domesticated animals “exist only because of the uses we have found for them.” The bond between domesticated farmed animals and humans involves, as Erik Marcus of Vegan.com has written, “one party cutting the other party’s throat,” and therefore does not merit preservation.
“It will be a barren world” indeed when giant migrating herds of wild buffalo disappear from the plains, and we lose “flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time” [Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, 2000]. Oh, wait, those are already gone.
The disappearance of domesticated farmed animals from our world will result in a resurgence of wildlife, since ranchers will no longer be able to call on the government to drive wild “pests” like prairie dogs to near extinction. Places currently over-grazed by cattle—many of Arizona's perennial riparian areas, for instance—will once again teem with life.
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